Native Plants of the Midwest: A Comprehensive Guide to the Best 500 Species for the Garden Alan Branhagen “recently published a book on the flora of a region which stretches more than a thousand miles from below North America’s evergreen northern woods to above the southern swamps and pine lands. In the introduction of Native Plants of the Midwest: A Comprehensive Guide to the Best 500 Species for the Garden, he writes, ‘No place else on earth has such an extreme continental climate, yet it is a place filled with plants of every size and in every hue.'” (KC Gardens)

Note: Alan Branhagen was director of horticulture at Powell Gardens for over 20 years. He now has a new job as director of operations at the Minnesota Landscape Arboretum at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis.

Garden Revolution How Our Landscapes Can Be a Source of Environmental Change This book by Larry Weaner and Thomas Christopher is “written from the perspective of the eastern half of the USA, dealing almost entirely with natives. Probably relevant as far west as the Great Plains in Kansas, the rest of us need to read it in a different way. Which we can do, as there is actually very little in the text that is specific only to the author’s region.” (Gardens Illustrated) Instead it is a practical guide to incorporating and layering plants into communities to recreate an environment filled with natural systems within our industrialized and urban world.